Media reporting shiat...

I've already had my shock last night when I heard Campbell Live will be talking to a "no-nonsense influential Art critic" about modern (read "post-modern") art. I mean, seriously. The art critics themselves can't tell apart "art" by postmodern artist and those by 4-year olds. If you need a narrative or years of training to understand and appreciate the artwork, there's something fundamentally wrong. Art is the way to talk to the soul, as opposed to talking to your intelligence. Writing an essay to deciper the art in order for it to be understood (especially when the art work is something like the pile of boxes and empty bottles that showed in the show's preview) is called creative writing: while the writing themselve may indeed show creativity and can be considered as art, the object itself... wtf?

Anyway, today I came across this gem from BBC about how wifi can be harmful to children: they can't find any evidence though, but it's possible. (Oh oh, my favourite weasle line from the article: "There have been no studies on the health effects of Wi-Fi equipment, but thousands on mobile phones and masts." See what they did? How they just weasle out like that and make you think the studies must be bad for the mobile phone and masts as well? Ingenious.) I'm not a biologist and I can't say for sure whether wifi harm people, but for goodness sake stop generating mass hysteria and report things with absolutely no evidence and aired purely to generate fear and feeding people psuedo-science, all in the anme of ratings. People in research have enough problem trying to reach out already, to get their points across. Let's face it: a lot of their findings won't make sense unless you have a real background knowledge, not what they spoon feed you in the second paragraph or an article. Generateing fear in public for the sake of rating is irresponsible, and is a crime against science.

Right, now I have to try to produce science of my own. *sigh*

EDIT: I went back to read the slashdot forum on the BBC article. Someone wrote: "In the meantime, their children are outside getting burnt without sunscreen." I actually laughed out loud.